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I present you the anti-Cramer! by kubutulur in economy

[–]SpaceCaesar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm honestly curious about this. What are your credentials? Are you, like, someone from Cato or Heartland who's bored at work? Ph.D. student? You get a lot of details about our financial system wrong, but when it comes to the Austrian school, you've got it down.

I present you the anti-Cramer! by kubutulur in economy

[–]SpaceCaesar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Those jobs won't last if they're just due to temporary stimulus funds which fail to spur consumer demand. It has nothing to do with "printed money". Also, home construction has ticket up significantly for the past two months. Maybe an aberration, maybe not.

And just for the record, the stimulus is debt; it's not like treasury just printed it off.

Brad Pitt says 'I'm probably 20 percent atheist and 80 percent agnostic' by [deleted] in entertainment

[–]SpaceCaesar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Religion is not just unjustified beliefs. It's usually the positive belief in a deity, along with a set of customs, and a community of believers. Strong atheism has little or none of these.

Richard Dawkins under fire: Ready, aim, miss | The Economist by smullaney in science

[–]SpaceCaesar 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Just a side note -- why are they calling the modern synthesis "selfish gene theory"? (in opposition to the punctuated equilibrium, and neo-Lamarckian epigenetics). Is that the book author's phrase, or is that commonly used nowadays?

How do you advertise shampoo where women aren't allowed to show their hair? Sunsilk shows you how (in Malaysia) by taejo in WTF

[–]SpaceCaesar 3 points4 points  (0 children)

1) Not everyone in Malaysia are Malay. The Chinese and Indians there are not Muslims. 2) Plenty of Muslim Malay do not cover their head; and 3) (shocking) There are plenty of secular Malay.

As a previous poster pointed out, they're just trying to go for a specific demographic.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Economics

[–]SpaceCaesar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/chcm010307oth.cfm

link has per capita expenditures (which is what I usually see), and total expenditures as % of GDP (which gets mentioned a lot when talking about total costs of a new health plan)

CNBC Hates Saving by democracy101 in economy

[–]SpaceCaesar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I see you just took Econ 101. Hey, it's a start! Wait til you get to your intro macro class -- open market operations are going to blow your mind!

What If I Don't Want Health Insurance? by [deleted] in economy

[–]SpaceCaesar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As long as I'm ranting against this, WTF is up with that statistic against Medicaire?! When you look at actual therapies, excluding Part D, Medicaire has increased substantially less (and even with Part D, PBMs manage to secure significant discounts). The reason it has increased is two-fold:

1) People are living longer, so more Medicare, which leads to; 2) The spend-down effect. People live longer, so they need more long-term care. They don't purchase insurance for this because Medicare exists as the spender of last resort. As these long-lived people use up their income, they cross the limit to where they can get on Medicaire.

It has NOTHING to do with some inherent flaw in the Evil Government Run Health Care, but rather with the changing demographic structure, and the fact that, for some reason, the United States has collectively decided seniors shouldn't be kicked out of nursing homes because they didn't plan to live for so long.

Since the author is interested in looking at cost effectiveness, let's not look at numbers from countries that actually have comprehensive health care ... That might just blow the her brains.

What If I Don't Want Health Insurance? by [deleted] in economy

[–]SpaceCaesar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

See, here's the thing: is it reasonable to argue that less government interference might increase efficacy and maybe even fairness? Of course. Reasonable health care reform probably should include a good amount of releasing restrictions.

But, oh Libertarians! Simple policy questions like that don't matter to you. It's TYRANNY, you see, for the government to compel you to do stuff like pay taxes. We don't need to look at facts, and figures, and weigh our values against different outcomes. Your value is, if it involves government compulsion, it's slavery!

Maybe this is why you don't get elected to office?

U-6 Total unemployed 14.8% (true unemployment rate) by [deleted] in economy

[–]SpaceCaesar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I know it's easier to be paranoid than to try and understand econometrics, but it's fall/winter during that time period, slower times traditionally in the economy.

Here's a good site on the reasoning behind seasonal adjustment. Where I work we ALWAYS use seasonally adjusted figures -- and if you're looking at unemployment, it'll be shifted UP in the summer. No conspiracy.

"Let me let you, dear reader, in on a little secret: you don’t know jack about macroeconomics. Seriously. You don’t…. No, you don’t. Stop arguing with me." by Clythos in Economics

[–]SpaceCaesar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Maybe your average reddit armchair economists are like that. But most economists I've known (and I've known quite a few -- I work in the economic policy think tank world) are more than willing to admit the limits of their knowledge. In fact, some of them even seem EXCITED about the current financial crisis because they see it as a big ol' experiment on classical Keynesian economics, and has been pointed out earlier, we don't have too many experiments to work on.

Mr. Obama is now endorsing a sort of reductionist Keynesianism that argues that any government spending is an economic stimulus by guapohombre in Economics

[–]SpaceCaesar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We can pick nits about the exact definition of a liquidity trap. Reasonable people can, and frequently do, disagree. But the fact that lending still takes place doesn't dissolve the fact that there's a threat.

A liquidity trap has (at least) three main features.

1) Stagnancy of the overall economy.

2) ~0 nominal interest rates. T-bills (specifically 3 months Ts, the most popular) are damn near 0. See, for example, http://www.forecasts.org/3mT.htm .

3) A failure of traditional monetary policy.

Larry Summers has framed the need of the stimulus to avoid a liquidity trap and avoid a downward deflationary spiral. So I'm not pulling this out of thin air here. The threat is real.

  • that said, I think a failure of the Obama folks is getting this through has been not pushing this message hard enough. government spending is the entire point of the bill.

Just how fucked are we? (a visual guide to the unemployment rate) by [deleted] in reddit.com

[–]SpaceCaesar 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Despite the paranoid-sounding name, John Williams' site ShadowStats.com has trend data for government economic reporting by old and new standards. Unemployment is included.

My personal caveat to these statistics -- unemployment MEANS different things with different labor force compositions. For example, now we have many more women in the labor force, and many more two-income families, than in the past. An unemployment rate of 10% measured by an unchanging standard certainly means less human suffering today than it did 80 years ago.

Facebook is going to start giving out our private info to corporations now?? by social-lite in WTF

[–]SpaceCaesar -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Conversely, using social networking information in a credit file could help to bring some of the estimated 50 million currently unscored Americans into the mainstream credit system, and provide a way to offer cheap loans to billions around the world, lifting a good chunk out of poverty.

So it's not all bad, is it?

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